28 March 2018

Since launch, the MS BotFramework has been changing very rapidly. So rapidly, in fact, that I recently gave up trying to keep up with my handrolled Python, and embraced (sigh) their NodeJS SDK. At least now I won't have to worry when they break stuff, right ?
One of the most recent BF changes is the deprecation and eventual removal of the default persistence API. You are now supposed to either use one of the pre-built Azure services (paying $$), or provide your own implementation. In pure Microsoft style, they state that rolling your own is very easy... but never actually provide a sample or even tell you which interface should be implemented.
I had to scavenge through their code to figure it out (at least they opensource their stuff these days), but I thought I'd save others a bit of aggravation, and here it is:

As you can see, it is indeed trivial, once you know how. It's sad that MS somehow, in the haste of deprecating their older interfaces, couldn't find the time to put this sample in their otherwise-extensive documentation. I suspect the fact that Azure is not mentioned anywhere might have something to do with it, but I'm sure I'm just assuming excessive malice and there is a perfectly-plausible explanation that does not involve greed. Or is there?

26 March 2018

I've been looking for a while for a Windows-native Twitter client that could sync with my other non-Windows devices (aka "supporting TweetMarker"). I've found one that claims to do that, Tweet It!, but there is a problem: it costs £3.5 upfront. That's a relatively high amount of money to throw down a well hoping that my wish will come true. However, because this feature is so rare, if it worked I'd be happy to pay three times as much, no questions asked. I just have no way to find out.

Appstores need a simple Trial Mode. All the current hacks (In-App-Purchases, subscriptions, refunds etc) are just that, clumsy workarounds to this glaring omission, which is why app prices are so squeezed down - to the chagrin of indie developers. Trial Mode would also bring huge collateral benefits like reducing reliance on SaaS services (something that Microsoft in particular should relish) and creating viable alternatives to the free-to-play bubble that has turned online gaming into a socially-accepted form of gambling addiction.

I doubt Apple will ever introduce Trial Mode - they are the dominant player and have little incentive to change the rules; and Android is a far west where the Play Store is almost irrelevant. But Microsoft should experiment with something like this, while the Windows Store is still young and evolving. Both developers and users would love it, they have been asking for something like this for years.

At some point somebody said hey, we need a management tool for all this stuff! "European Council" service, with a set of dedicated subthreads for the real work (European Commission).

But that service will run amok at times, let's add some monitoring and security checks! EuroParliament service - took a few rewrites to get right, nobody really likes to work on monitoring tools; but like systemd on Linux, the EP service should eventually take over anything that talks to real world I/O, so it's pretty important.

Now all this stuff needs to communicate, with common formats that avoid parsing and reparsing umpteen different types of data back and forth, and ways to look up the right service for a given job - so we created a "CommonMarket SDK", optionally turbocharged with options like Schengen. When exceptions are thrown, the SDK will automatically invoke the ECJ service to resolve matters; and it will self-update by talking to the management services. Once everyone adopts the SDK, then it should be easier to make more radical changes through that (ECB, Euro, common fiscal policy...). But in the end nobody likes change, it's always hard to break backward-compatibility.

Now, across the company/continent, various departments/nations have adopted some or all of these services, but most of them ended up relying on the SDK one way or the other, so it became basically mandatory. At one point we had to give a name to the whole framework, and "EU" it was.
It's definitely not a monolith, but there are so many moving parts that the management services are now essential. Some departments have renounced their Write access (Iceland, Norway, Switzerland...) and some were never granted that privilege (Turkey); some departments were forced to change their processes to suit the framework (Italy, Greece, the Eastern countries...). Things are still pretty shaky, developers are still very much at work, but it's getting better with time. It's making more and more services possible and even *easy* to bootstrap (EMA, EFSA, Erasmus...). Bugs creep in and out, we keep adding more and more fault-tolerance, the workload is not yet distributed fairly, etc etc; but it's accomplishing some very heavy tasks that are absolutely mission-critical, if we want to keep the company running and competing with the big boys.
...
Then, one day, a department said they'd like to go back to pen and paper. Except for a few services, for which they want to hand-craft packets individually, but those services should just assume the data is still as good as before, and never throw exceptions - they will ignore any response from the ECJ service anyway. Some of what their department does depends on another department, which has no intention to go back to pen and paper, but they say they will somehow give them bits and receive paper, without anyone actually doing the transformation, and without any friction at all. And they'd like to retain write access to the management services too, thank you very much, plus veto powers, so nobody can change SDK formats without consulting them.
Cue facepalming.